The Philosopher in the Valley

Alex Karp, a biracial Jewish man with dyslexia raised in a left-wing Philadelphia household, became one of the most unlikely and consequential figures in American technology. Michael Steinberger, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a Haverford College classmate of Karp's, traces Karp's improbable rise from philosophy student to billionaire CEO of Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Palantir's internal mission, which the company calls "saving the Shire," is to defend the Western liberal order; its software is used by the CIA, the U.S. military, and dozens of government agencies and corporations worldwide.

Karp grew up in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia, a neighborhood known for intentional racial integration. His father, Bob Karp, was a German-Jewish pediatrician; his mother, Leah Jaynes Karp, was Black, the great-granddaughter of a formerly enslaved person. At age eight, Karp was diagnosed with dyslexia and spent three years at a school for children with learning disabilities, an experience he describes as the greatest adversity he ever faced but one that taught him collaboration and quick decision-making. On the eve of college, his parents' bitter divorce left him emotionally shattered; his father refused to pay for school, and Leah scraped together the money through loans and her pension.

At Haverford, Karp majored in philosophy. He went on to Stanford Law School, where he met Peter Thiel, a fellow first-year student and self-declared libertarian. Despite opposing views, the two bonded over chess and political arguments. After graduating, Karp moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to pursue a doctorate at Goethe University, gaining admission to a colloquium led by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. His dissertation, completed in 2002, analyzes the rhetoric of fascism through a controversial speech by the German writer Martin Walser. Karp developed a deep affinity for Germany but concluded he had no desire to become an academic.

In the early 2000s, Thiel, who had cofounded PayPal, recognized that the anti-fraud software his company developed could be adapted to help the U.S. government fight terrorism. The September 11, 2001, attacks had exposed a catastrophic data integration failure: The CIA and FBI both possessed evidence suggesting an imminent attack but failed to share it. Thiel recruited Stanford alumni Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale to build a prototype. When Karp reconnected with Thiel, his cofounders concluded that Karp, despite lacking any background in technology or management, had the conviction to lead the company. He became CEO.

Palantir's software merges, manages, and analyzes large quantities of data without collecting, storing, or selling it. Funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, the company built its first product, Gotham, through an iterative process in which engineers embedded directly with CIA analysts, pioneering what Palantir calls "forward-deployed engineers." After years of development, Palantir secured a formal CIA contract, the first validation that its technology worked. Karp insisted on building privacy controls into the software, but a series of scandals undercut that commitment: At JPMorganChase, a former Secret Service agent used Palantir's software to surveil the bank's own employees; leaked emails revealed the company's involvement in a disinformation plot against WikiLeaks; and Palantir settled a lawsuit alleging industrial espionage.

Palantir's struggle with the Pentagon became a defining battle. The Army's battlefield intelligence system, the Distributed Common Ground System-Army, known as D-sigs, was a dangerous failure that contributed to soldier casualties. Despite field tests in which Palantir easily outperformed D-sigs and nearly 30 urgent appeals from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army officials refused to adopt the software. In 2016, Palantir sued the Army, and a judge ruled that the Army had acted "arbitrarily and capriciously."

Thiel's endorsement of Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican presidential nominee, created a crisis for Palantir. The company's long-standing contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) became toxic as the Trump administration launched a harsh immigration crackdown. Documents showed joint operations using a Palantir-designed database, and in August 2019, ICE led a raid on Mississippi food-processing plants in which nearly 700 people were arrested. Protests erupted outside Palantir's offices, and some 200 employees signed a letter objecting to the ICE relationship. Karp defended the contract, arguing that companies cannot renege on government obligations because they dislike a president. The company was also implicated in the Cambridge Analytica scandal through a London-based employee who helped develop the app used to harvest Facebook data.

Meanwhile, Palantir developed Foundry, a new platform that replaced its limited financial-sector product and proved far more versatile for corporate clients such as BP and Airbus. The Covid-19 pandemic became Palantir's most dramatic proof of concept: Enlisted by White House coronavirus coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, Palantir employees built HHS Protect, a dashboard integrating data from all 3,000 U.S. counties, and Tiberius, the dashboard for the vaccine rollout. Palantir went public on September 30, 2020, through a direct public offering at $10 per share, with a controversial share structure giving Karp, Thiel, and Cohen near-permanent control. By early 2021, retail investors had driven the stock to $35, and Karp became a billionaire.

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine thrust Palantir into a new role. Palantir had taken over Google's role in the Pentagon's AI program, Project Maven, after Google withdrew following employee protests. Through Maven, Palantir's software helped the U.S. military track Russian troop movements and share targeting intelligence with the Ukrainians. Karp traveled to Kyiv to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky, generating worldwide headlines. The company's stock nonetheless dropped below $10 before Palantir finally turned profitable in late 2022, after nearly two decades in business.

The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel became the most consequential event of Karp's career. Palantir took out a full-page ad in The New York Times declaring its solidarity. The Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, had used Palantir's software for nearly a decade; after the attack, the Israeli military and domestic intelligence service also adopted it. Karp held a board meeting in Tel Aviv and met privately with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The massacre accelerated Karp's political transformation: He publicly warned the Democratic Party that Jewish donors were prepared to defect over what he perceived as tolerance of antisemitism, attacked diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and dismissed the threat posed by Trump, telling the author, "I don't think Trump is a fascist."

The April 2023 launch of Palantir's Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) sparked a surge in commercial business, and in September 2024, Palantir was added to the S&P 500, the major U.S. stock index. Trump's reelection in November 2024 brought a decisive shift. Karp embraced the new administration, praising the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a cost-cutting initiative led by tech billionaire and Trump adviser Elon Musk, donating $1 million to Trump's inaugural committee, and joining the president on a trip to Saudi Arabia. In February 2025, Karp published The Technological Republic, arguing for tech-driven nationalism. The book hails Walser, whose speech Karp's dissertation had characterized as fascistic rhetoric, as a free-speech hero, while omitting any discussion of the populist right's threat to democratic governance.

Palantir signed a $30 million contract with ICE for a platform called ImmigrationOS to expedite deportations. Thirteen former employees published an open letter titled "The Scouring of the Shire," invoking the company's Tolkien-derived mission to accuse Palantir of "normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs." By mid-August 2025, Palantir's stock approached $200 per share, its market capitalization reached approximately $430 billion, and Karp's net worth exceeded $10 billion. When Steinberger asks whether Karp still believes Trump is not a fascist, Karp ignores the question.